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Startup advice: cold recruiting

stripe.com

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Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#21

Post by Peroni »

Whilst entirely agree with Gregg's approach, I wouldn't use his response rates as a metric to measure your own response rates. Cold approaches like this tend to have significantly higher response rates when you are a company like Stripe.

I would expect that most of the people they are approaching have heard of Stripe and are familiar with their high calibre team. If the same people are approached by a company/startup they have never heard of, the response rate will be very different.

It's still a fantastic approach and arguably the best approach regardless of how well or little known your company is.

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#22

Post by Silhouette »

itafroma wrote: post #7

As someone on the receiving end of these emails, the point about demonstrating some knowledge of who I am or what I've done in the opening of the email is essential. It's almost guaranteed a reply, even if the opportunity doesn't seem immediately interesting. It's amazing how virtually none of the recruiting emails I've received do that.

The inverse also applies: if I get recruiting mail from someone who demonstrates no special knowledge about me that a Google search or similar wouldn't instantly turn up, it tends to go in the circular file without a second thought. And never refuse to tell me how you found me in the rare event that I'm still interested enough to ask anyway, at least not if you expect any further interaction...

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#23

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

I think this is a pretty good approach to cold emails for a company like Stripe. If your company doesn't have the name recognition of a Stripe, however, the "if you're up for it, I'd love to grab coffee next week to chat" close in an introductory email is probably going to be a lot harder to pull off with most candidates because you almost certainly won't be able to establish that the value of the meeting might reasonably be higher than the cost of the recipient's time.

This is why in-person networking is so important for most startups. To make the most of it, everybody in the organization should understand that networking is an opportunity (to meet potential customers, partners and employees) and they should be prepared to articulate a compelling description of what the company does. It's a gentle version of "always be closing."

Unfortunately, you don't need to go to many events to discover that a lot of startup founders and employees aren't effective at communicating what their companies do and why the person they're talking to should be interested in learning more. And then they wonder why they have a hard time attracting talent.

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#24

Post by patio11 »

gdb wrote: post #19
Zepplock wrote: post #14

Hello Greg, I would love to receive one of your "cold" emails ;)

At this point it wouldn't be cold!

If I can circle this, star it, and shout it from the rooftops: if you meet someone at a meetup/conference/random coffeehouse or you Internet-meet them in HN comments or a blog discussion or whatever follow that up with an email. Even if you don't have anything to ask for, just say "Hey, it was great to meet you. We should keep in touch." Then actually keep in touch. Then, the next time you do need something, it isn't a bolt out of the blue when you show up in their inbox. (This is, naturally, reciprocal, and you should tell people that.)

This is Every Sales Occupation Ever 101, but engineers seem to have a cultural block against doing it, as if sending an acquaintance "Hey, saw your startup just raised a round / you got a new job / you had a baby. Congratulations!" is anti-social behavior if there is ever the possibility that that relationship would result in money changing hands in the future.

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#25

Post by gdb »

hglaser wrote: post #17

"As an experiment, we've decided to try out a startup advice column to share what we've learned along the way." This sounds really useful. I would love a way to subscribe to these advice posts (RSS, Twitter, email are all fine) without subscribing to the rest of the Stripe blog!

Yep, I hear you. If this is successful, we'll likely break out a separate blog-alike for them.

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#26

Post by gdb »

edw519 wrote: post #20

Hey gdb, I have made thousands of posts on Hacker News, Twitter, and my own blog. Every time someone emails me about one of my posts and tells me about how it affected them or reminded them of something, it makes my day. So thank you! I'm not interested in working for anyone I don't already know. But no worries, I'm an easy person to get to know and with all this great technology, you don't even have to meet me in re…

Hey edw519,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

This certainly isn't intended to promote insincerity: the most important point is a proof-of-work. People tend to be pretty discerning, and can tell if you're just fishing for a throwaway comment because a blog post told you, or if you have something genuinely thoughtful to say. The purpose of these emails generally is pretty transparent, and it's certainly fine if people simply don't reply.

I certainly agree with you that very often, "looking for a job" isn't a binary thing for people — they like getting to know other people in tech with a view to there being any of a number of ways to work together over time. These emails are often a good way to kick that off while being pretty upfront about your intent.

- gdb :)

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#27

Post by netcan »

Zepplock wrote: post #14

Hello Greg, I would love to receive one of your "cold" emails ;)

Find and replace 'company' with 'person' and follow his cold email advice. As he just said, it's not cold at this point. But the advice still applies.

Be concise, include proof-of-work & say the bare minimum required to get a face-to-face chat.

:)

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#28

Post by Jemaclus »

> Always have the ping come from a non-recruiter.

I got an email a few days ago from the CEO of a startup in SF. In the email, he followed all of the rules in this email, including trying to get face-to-face chat by offering to get coffee. I'm not really looking for a job but I am open to new opportunities, so I replied and agreed to get coffee.

The response comes from a recruiter.

What? The CEO sends me an email and then hands my response off to a recruiter? Or did the recruiter send the email on behalf of the CEO? I'm not even sure what's going on, but it's incredibly misleading. And then when I respond and politely decline to proceed further, the recruiter tries to set me up with a phone call with yet another person that isn't the original CEO.

What part of this makes sense? What happened to the original, informal face-to-face chat?

You totally blew it, dude. YOU contacted me, not the other way around. You have the burden of proof of attracting me to your company. You should be the one jumping through hoops, not me.

Would you do this bait-and-switch to your biggest customer? If the answer is yes, you probably don't need to be CEO. And if not, then why would you treat a potential team member worse than you would treat your best customer? C'mon. Be smart about this recruiting thing.

Re: Startup advice: cold recruiting

#29

Post by baddox »

itafroma wrote: post #7

As someone on the receiving end of these emails, the point about demonstrating some knowledge of who I am or what I've done in the opening of the email is essential. It's almost guaranteed a reply, even if the opportunity doesn't seem immediately interesting. It's amazing how virtually none of the recruiting emails I've received do that.

Out of curiosity, why do you tend to reply to recruiting emails when they demonstrate some knowledge of who you are? Although most recruiters don't do that, it's still fairly well-known (at least around here) that recruiters should do that at the bare minimum. So it seems to me that a mention of some fact about my life or work just means their recruiting team is more well-managed or -staffed. Maybe they tell their recruiters to spend 5 minutes on each person looking for a GitHub or Twitter account. Unless there's a positive correlation between the quality of a recruiting team and the desirability of the job being offered (which I doubt), I don't see why you would reply to these sorts of recruiting emails.
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